


Just us fossils here

by FlamingoQueen



Series: Fossilized [1]
Category: Captain America (Movies)
Genre: (It's totally magic), (also pronounced "coping mechanisms"), (it's pronounced "coping mechanisms"), Assume they rebuilt SHIELD but left out all the HYDRA, Bucky Barnes Has Issues, Crack Treated Seriously, Creative names for things, Dinosaurs, Established Relationship, Happy Steve Bingo, It's Not Paranoia If They're Really Out To Get You, M/M, Post-Recovery Bucky Barnes, Steve Rogers Has Issues, Time Travel, Vacation, it's not magic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-19
Updated: 2019-09-19
Packaged: 2020-10-21 10:55:20
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 9,251
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20692355
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/FlamingoQueen/pseuds/FlamingoQueen
Summary: The dinosaur pauses mid-step, turns its head to look straight at them, and makes a breathy huffing noise. After a tense moment, it looks in another direction and huffs again. Then another direction. And then, contrary to all of Steve’s current hopes and dreams, it looks back at them.Steve swallows and makes a fist. He’s going to have to punch a dinosaur, he just knows it. However well it may have started, this is shaping up to become the least relaxing vacation he’s ever heard of.(Or: Steve and Bucky’s S.H.I.E.L.D.-mandated vacation takes a sharp turn toward dinosaurs.)





	Just us fossils here

**Author's Note:**

> Here's part one of a series based on my Happy Steve Bingo card! This is for O5: Time Travel. Everything else in the series will be a sequel or a prequel to this one. 
> 
> (And there is no relation whatsoever to the Hazy series, so at long last, not everything is horrible. ^_^)

****Looking back on it, Steve supposes the critical mistake was his saying “this looks like a nice spot for lunch.”

They hadn’t intended to eat in the ruins. They had planned to head back down toward the hot springs, and to stop at the little bend in the path with the quaint bench overlooking the valley. They’d thought it would be pretty, with the sun setting off to one side and making the canopy of trees down the hillside glow. 

It was going to be picturesque, and Steve was going to capture it in charcoal as part of his vacation log, along with his sketch of Bucky half-naked and half-asleep, artfully shrouded in steam as he leaned on a rock in the hot springs, looking like the water really was melting all the stress away on a “deep, mystical level, revealing his timeless inner self,” like the pamphlet claimed.

And Bucky flipping him off in their hotel room while sliding a glock into his pack for this day-hike despite having “left it at home, Steve, give it a fucking break, already.” How he’d gotten that past JARVIS on his way out of the Tower is still a mystery, unless JARVIS is his accomplice, which Steve started suspecting over a year ago. But it’s hardly the only mystery, or the first time this has happened—the smuggled weaponry part, anyway—and the bird Bucky had flipped him was affectionate.

And Bucky clambering up onto a mossy petroglyph looking majestic with his razor-sharp jawline and wind-swept hair. And his fine, fine ass. And his powerful thighs. And shapely calves. And, really, just all of him, right down to the playful little smirk he always gets when he knows Steve’s looking at him with a lusty motive in his heart and fingers itching to do something about it.

His vacation log does include all the rest of their trip so far, and delightfully so, if Bucky’s laughter when he paged through it was any indication. It does not include the picturesque valley with the sunset reflected off the greenery, however. So whoever ends up finding it in the ruins will miss out on that part of their vacation just like he and Bucky will miss out—are missing out—on that part of their vacation.

And Bucky had been so intent on getting absolutely every last thing out of this mandatory de-stress vacation that he could possibly make S.H.I.E.L.D. pay for. It’s a shame he has to miss out on any of it after taking such care with their schedule.

“Steve.” It’s not even as loud as a whisper, but Bucky still manages to make it sound both deadpan and incredibly put-upon.

He looks over at Bucky, hunkered beside him against a fallen tree trunk taller than either of them, clutching his Collected Tales to his chest like it’s a lifeline and not just a collection of elf comics he’s been reading more to poke at Steve than for any other reason Steve can see. 

“Yeah, Buck?” He aims for a light and breezy tone, an “everything is fine” tone, a casual “what’s up” tone. He can hear for himself how very, very far from that mark his tone lands, and not just because he’s whispering.

“You know how I always used to have to pull you out of stupid shit you got yourself mixed up in?” Bucky asks, somehow sustaining the calm-but-not-really-calm tone.

Steve turns his water bottle over in his hands. Bucky’s memories hadn’t come back quick or clean or in one piece, but these days Bucky remembers enough to know what he’s talking about. Steve still decides to play innocent. “The alley fights, you mean?”

“And after.” 

Alright, point to Bucky. “Okay, yeah?”

“_This is one of those times._”

Steve sighs. “You said you couldn’t translate the symbols, Bucky. That’s not the same as ‘Gee, Steve, I think this will transport us back to the age of… whatever that thing is.’”

“That thing” sends a hellish, booming shriek into the air somewhere above them, as though it knows they’re talking about it, and Steve still can’t help but wish he could draw the thing in his vacation log.

“I _ said_,” Bucky responds once the noise dies down to the previous jungle-style cacophony of chitters and squeaks, “they didn’t look like any language I knew but that they looked _ wrong_, and we probably _ shouldn’t touch them_.”

Steve looks up at the canopy of what is some kind of pine tree or redwood overhead. “You might have done.”

“I _ did _ do,” Bucky hisses at him. “And _ you _did do. And so now we’re hiding in a bunch of ferns from a bat the size of a school bus that should not be airborne at all.”

“I see your point, Bucky.”

“Good.” Bucky turns to face forward again, closing his eyes and leaning his head back against the bark.

“Was there anything else?”

“Nope.” Bucky doesn’t open his eyes. “Just wanted you to acknowledge the role you played in this backpacking trip gone land before time on us.”

If that’s what this is, Steve muses. Alternate dimension sounds like it’s probably more accurate than time travel, though the pamphlet had a lot to say about mystical inner selves and embracing the timeless magic of life.

“If I take full responsibility for this, can we focus on an escape plan?”

“Already way ahead of you, Steve.”

And that is exactly what he wants to hear. Because yes, with the exclusion of one chunk of time spent imprisoned in an Austrian factory and another chunk of time spent brainwashed by HYDRA, Bucky _ was _ always getting him out of shit. And yes, hunkering down in fern gully hiding from a huge, white, long-necked bat _ is _one of those times. 

And Bucky is one hundred percent welcome, invited and encouraged to get him out of it.

* * *

The demonic flying school bus ends up circling the forest for a good hour, which gives Steve plenty of time to retrace their footsteps, but not nearly enough time to come up with a surefire way this disaster is technological in nature and not magical in the slightest.

He and Bucky were wrapping up at the ruins. He’d gotten his charcoal rubbing of the symbols carved into the rock. Bucky had climbed just about every hunk of rock in the area. He’d drawn Bucky on one of the petroglyphs, and he’d drawn the ruins themselves. Bucky had befriended a little bird that was drawn to the shine of his metal fingers. And Steve had snuck in a quick sketch of that, because Bucky was adorable when he was unintentionally role-playing as a Disney princess.

And Steve had said, “this looks like a nice spot for lunch.” And Bucky had agreed. And they had sat down on the large, smooth expanse of rock poking up out of the grass and moss, and taken off their packs, and retrieved their sandwiches. There’d been a nice breeze. It had been pleasant.

They’d talked for a while, and then Bucky had gotten his Collected Tales out to read one of the comics in it for a bit while eating. Steve had gone back through the pamphlet, reading some of the New Age nonsense about the spiritual resonance of water throughout time. He’d laughed. The pamphlet was slated to live between two pages of his vacation log.

Steve had taken a drink from his water bottle, and had read an interesting passage aloud to Bucky, about the hot springs down the mountain being heated by a pocket of magma somewhere under all the ruins, about the little underground stream running over the magma chamber and coming out hot.

He’d said, “isn’t that neat?” and Bucky had said, “sure, that’s neat; geology for you.” Bucky had turned a page and taken a bite out of his sandwich. He’d asked Steve if the “woo-woo flyer” said anything about the symbols on the rock. It had not.

Steve had tucked the flyer into his pack, not only to keep it safe for his vacation log, but also because it was a breezy day, and Captain America does not litter, even accidentally. He’d pulled out the rubbing he’d done of the stone with the symbols, just to look at it again, because the symbols were interesting. 

There was a gust of wind, and he’d moved to hold the paper with both hands to keep it from flying away. Bucky had moved to help despite having both hands full, and they’d jostled each other. His water bottle had sloshed a little. Maybe onto the paper.

And then it wasn’t late afternoon in a cluster of beautiful but desolate mountainside ruins. It was a lot warmer, and lot more surrounded by trees, and lot louder with bugling and hissing and chattering sounds, and there were a lot more ferns underfoot.

They were still sitting on a wide, flat rock. The same wide, flat rock, even. They were still pressed together as when they’d jostled each other. Bucky still had his sandwich and his collected comics about elves and things. Steve still had his water bottle and his sheet of paper. 

His sheet of paper, however, no longer had any symbols on it, nor any charcoal marks at all.

And in an hour, Steve has gone through that scenario no fewer than five times in his mind, supplying every detail he can recall, trying to determine the exact moment alien technology had stepped in and done them a disservice. 

But he isn’t seeing it. They have no packs. They have no flyer. They have no symbols on the paper. They have no signals on their phones—or at least, on his phone. His was in his pocket, but Bucky’s might be in his pack at the ruins. And try as he might, Steve is coming up empty-handed for a logical explanation for what has happened.

* * *

“Okay,” Bucky says, once they haven’t heard the giant shrieking bat for fifteen minutes.

Steve waits for him to continue, to say something like “here’s what we’re going to do” or “this is just like when.” Because, yes, in many situations, Steve would take charge and get them both moving, would lead their little team of two as efficiently as he leads the Avengers on a mission, or the STRIKE teams before Insight, or the Howlies before that.

But randomly appearing in a forest with ferns as tall as he is and trees bigger around than most cars is more Bucky’s area of expertise, in that it’s weird, entirely unexpected, and probably impossible. And most of the last seventy years or so of Bucky’s life have been that way, even if a little more skewed toward assassination and a little less toward “suddenly forest.” 

That, and Bucky might not consciously remember all the science fiction he read as a kid, but he’s still got the results of all that reading—an imagination that includes the impossible right alongside the practical. He’d been charmed by the woo-woo pamphlet and the assorted flyers hinting that the rejuvenation available to patrons was like going back in time. He had brought along a collection of comics about dragons and wizards and things.

Steve is all set to prod Bucky into continuing with whatever plan he’s hatched while they waited out the bat thing, but the snapping crack of a tree branch nearby cuts off any words he might have said.

Now what?

“What” happens to be a shshing of fern leaves and then a gigantic gaping maw filled with teeth, nostrils flaring as the head turns this way and that.

The head is at the end of a thick, scaly neck, and sports bright red horn-like ridges over the yellow eyes. And the neck is at the end of an absolute tank of a gut with smaller arms than seems logical for the size of the beast. The ferns cover the rest of it up, and Steve is really hoping those ferns cover him and Bucky up, too. 

And this makes the flying school bus a pterodactyl, probably, because what is stalking through the ferns between the tree trunks is almost certainly a tyrannosaur. Which is patently impossible. They aren’t even anywhere near Costa Rica.

He’s seen Jurassic Park. Sam made him watch it even though it hadn’t been worth a spot on his list. And a tyrannosaur was supposed to be taller than this by at least ten feet. But, well, what else could it possibly be? And they sure don’t have any signal flares.

The dinosaur pauses mid-step, turns its head to look straight at them, and makes a breathy huffing noise. After a tense moment, it looks in another direction and huffs again. Then another direction. And then, contrary to all of Steve’s current hopes and dreams, it looks back at them.

Steve swallows and makes a fist. He’s going to have to punch a dinosaur, he just knows it. However well it may have started, this is shaping up to become the least relaxing vacation he’s ever heard of.

Bucky holds an arm out in front of him to keep him where he is, and slowly pulls one of his knives out of a boot. He’s not flashy about it. There’s no intimidation here, just Bucky stealthily arming himself, though he’s clearly not seen Jurassic Park, because moving is exactly what you _ don’t _want to do, according to the movie. Even to fetch a knife.

Steve has a lot of appreciation stored up when it comes to the visual of Bucky handling any number of weapons, but mostly knives. Bucky’s formidable with a knife. He has grace and skill and strength and beauty. When he handles a knife, it’s like he’s just moving another part of his hand. 

He can throw a knife that’s not meant to be thrown and still hit his target square on more often than should be possible. Steve’s seen him drive knives into limestone cliffs when the handholds just weren’t available, and he’s seen him hamstring an opponent without seeming to think about it, all of which probably says some things about how he’s spent the majority of his life, but that doesn’t make it any less appealing to behold.

A fight to the death between Bucky with a knife and a literal dinosaur with all the teeth and claws that entails would make an amazing sketch in his vacation log. But all the same, Steve would rather that dinosaur just keep on moving. 

Because if Bucky was put up against almost any human being, Steve wouldn’t have any doubt about the victor, but he isn’t certain Bucky will win a fight with a twelve-foot tall t-rex.

If that’s what this thing is. The tyrannosaur in the movie was taller, sure, and stockier, but it also didn’t have huge horny eyebrows, and its arms were shorter. And it wasn’t sort of tiger striped along its back in green and brown. And it didn’t have some kind of furry quill setup along the back of its neck and the top of its head.

Steve doesn’t have an opportunity to discover who would win the fight, because the… dinosaur… seems to catch a whiff of something tastier further on ahead and stalks off that direction instead of investigating their little patch of head-high ferns.

After a few minutes of remaining silent, just in case, Bucky gets to his feet and hauls Steve up.

“Alright,” Bucky says, his voice low and soft, but determined and not at all overwhelmed. “New plan.”

Steve doesn’t know what the old plan had been—their near-encounter with what cannot have been an actual dinosaur prevented him from asking about it. But he’s on board to hear the new plan. Especially if the new plan involves the two of them spreading their single sheet of paper out on a flat, dry surface and trying to put the symbols back on it.

Maybe that first rock, just in case they have to be in the same place for whatever it was to work again and beam them back to real life.

Bucky reaches up under the back of his jacket and withdraws a mean-looking fuck-off knife that’s easily a foot long tip-to-tip. “If Godzilla comes back, we team up and take him down. Here.” He holds the knife out, handle-first.

“_Bucky_.”

“What,” he says flatly. “You knew I was carrying.”

“I knew you had a gun in your bag, a knife in each boot and one in your pocket, Buck. I didn’t know you had a machete strapped to your back.” He would have known, if Bucky wasn’t so weird about letting people—even Steve—see him without a shirt on. 

Steve’s still borderline surprised Bucky had agreed to actually get into the water at the hot springs, since that meant exposing his left shoulder, and that in turn meant taking his shirt and jacket off. Transitions like that—dressing or undressing—are a no-fly zone that Steve has learned to just live with for the sake of Bucky’s comfort. They’re also apparently a secret-weapon-stashing zone.

“First off, it’s not a machete. If I had a machete, we’d be a lot better off than we are.” Bucky retrieves a second one from the same place. “Also, I have two. Because redundancy saves people’s asses.”

Steve stares at him for a long moment, incredulousness at the extent of Bucky’s paranoia warring with gratefulness for the same. When he finally does speak, it’s not the “Captain America has his doubts about your choices” voice, though, so the latter clearly wins out.

“I love you so much,” he says. “_And _ your paranoia.”

Bucky gives him a rakish grin while unbuckling the sheathes from the harness he’s got hidden away beneath either his jacket or his shirt. “It ain’t paranoia if there really _ are _three-ton reptiles out to eat you.”

Steve accepts the sheath Bucky hands him. “That’s not why you packed these.”

“No, but let’s say it was.” Bucky pulls him in for a side-hug. “Hook that water bottle to your belt, and let’s go see what the fuck we’re up against.”

* * *

It’s a relatively quick hike to the edge of the ferns, though they both end up with more than a few mouthfuls of greenery in the process and it’s troublesome not having somewhere hands-free to cart the symbol-free paper and Collected Tales.

When the tree trunks finally give way and the ferns start to thin out, Steve can see for miles and miles. The birds in the sky are not birds, and there are a lot of them. The cattle grazing on the smaller ferns, occasional palms and scruffy little pine saplings are not cattle, and there are a lot of them. The little darting ground birds weaving in and out snatching fallen cones and snapping up insects are not… 

And those aren’t giraffes out in the distance, either.

“Dinosaurs?” Steve asks, finally accepting that yes, this might be happening.

There’s a weird, vaguely melodic honking in the distance, like a herd of ill-tempered trombones are having a spirited argument. It’s joined by the breathy hisses and dull stomping of the… stegosaurs, he supposes… closer in.

“Dinosaurs,” Bucky confirms.

Steve can’t tell by his tone whether he’s feeling grim about that or giddy. He’s not entirely sure about his own feelings on the matter, either.

“And we’re surprised by that, right?” 

“Oh, yeah,” Bucky says. “Your woo-woo flyer never said anything about the area being an ancient dinosaur burial site, did it?”

Steve shakes his head. “But Nat always did say I was fossil.”

* * *

Back at their rock, which is at least sort of hidden in the ferns and also possibly important for other reasons—reasons like going home—Steve stares at the empty paper.

Symbols rubbed onto the paper in charcoal could be distorted by water, yes. But they can’t be erased entirely by just a little splash. This is the right paper. It cannot be empty, but somehow, it is. An entire expanse of white, not a smudge on it.

“It just doesn’t make sense,” he mumbles. 

Bucky picks at a nail with the tip of one of his smaller knives. “It doesn’t have to make sense, Steve. It just _ is_.” He gestures with the knife. “It’s magic. Magic’s like that.”

“Magic isn’t real.”

“Sure it is. What about that guy up in Greenwich Village? Dr. Weirdo, or whoever. He’s got magic. His cape flipped me off once on a video conference.”

“Dr. Strange,” Steve says. And Bucky probably deserved it, too. He’s got an obnoxious streak as wide as his paranoid streak when he has to interact with people who think they’re better than anyone else, and Strange is even worse about that than Tony can be at times. 

Steve sighs and rubs at an eye. “And it’s not magic. It’s just really advanced alien technology. Like all the Asgardian things—it’s technology so advanced we can’t see or understand how it works.”

Bucky rolls his eyes. “Okay, so what button did we accidentally push to activate the teleporter beam on this utterly invisible device that shot-put us all the way back to when dinosaurs ruled the world?”

And to Steve’s chagrin, that _does_ seem to be what happened. Steve goes back and forth on the matter, but an alternate dimension seems like it would be really alternate. Different sky, truly bizarre plants and animals. More people. 

Everything here seems pretty real and normal, with the exception of the dinosaurs. The ferns are some kind of fern. The palms are some kind of palm. The trees are some kind of tree. There are some pine cones underfoot, and some mushrooms growing out of trees, and the bugs all look like normal bugs, even if they’re a little bigger than the bugs he’s seen before.

So if he’s going with time travel… 

Ugh, he’s going with time travel. 

“Thor doesn’t push a button to go back to Asgard,” Steve finally says. “He raises his hammer and Heimdall pulls him up and ruins the landscaping.”

“You think maybe Heimdall is fucking with us?” Bucky sounds like he’s maybe a little hopeful that this is an Asgardian prank, and Steve really can’t blame him.

“Not exactly. But there’s a mechanism of some kind that we must have tripped. It’s not magic.”

Bucky gives him the “sure, Steve, sure” expression that is the opposite of agreeing with him, and takes a cautious drink from what is now their shared water bottle. “So are you thinking we re-trip the trap and get hauled back to the future, or what?”

“Something like that.” If he could only remember the symbols. They’re sliding around in his head like trying to read in a dream, and he can’t quite place them. “We just have to think. If we got here—”

“Now.”

Steve stares at him. “…What?”

Bucky shrugs, and gives him a little grin. “It’s time travel. We’re probably in the same place just at a very different time. So, it’s ‘now,’ not ‘here.’”

Steve can feel his eye twitching. Lightening the mood or not, this hardly seems like the time make jokes about semantics. “Now,” he says, willing to humor Bucky if it gets them to the point faster. “If we got _ now_, then we figure out how to get… then. It’s simple.”

“Simple. Sure.” Bucky gets to his feet and peers over the tops of the ferns, looking for who only knows what. Maybe just looking to make sure there’s nothing to be seen.

“You remember the symbols, Buck?” They seem like they’d be the key to this mystery. 

They disappeared from the paper (which is impossible), and have been disappearing from his brain as well (which is… improbable). But while Bucky’s memory of his own past is fragmented at best, he does remember most new things as well as Steve does when there isn’t any electricity involved. He might be able to remember some of them, maybe enough of them that they can bounce memories off each other and repopulate the paper.

“The ones I told you not to touch?” Bucky sits back down, apparently satisfied with his visual check of the immediate area. “Yeah, I remember them, Captain Curiosity.”

“Do you remember what they _ looked _like?”

Bucky glares at him like it’s a trick question or a very unfunny joke. 

“Because I kind of don’t,” Steve says, partly to share the information and partly to clarify his intent. The last thing they need now is an argument.

Bucky’s glare loses its defensive quality and gains an undercurrent of uncertainty. “You don’t—?” He makes an impatient gimme motion. “Fanny pack, Steve. Charcoal.”

Steve hands him a charcoal pencil with a glare of his own. “It’s a belt pouch.”

“Sure it is, pal.” Bucky leans over one corner of the paper, pencil in hand and eyes intent, and then hesitates. The hesitation extends into a pause and then extends further into a stillness that isn’t planning to change. “Fuck,” he whispers, incredulous with a hint of fear.

So he can’t remember them, either. Steve had been afraid of that. He wonders if the squirrely symbols at the edges of his memories are anything like the memories Bucky struggles to keep hold of on his bad days. If so, he has never been sympathetic enough, and he feels bad.

“You can see them, but you can’t see them, right?” he asks, just to be sure Bucky’s got the same thing going on.

Bucky sits up straight, gives the paper a frown and the pencil a deeper frown, and then hands the pencil back. “Like those magic eye things Barton loves so much. Here’s a page of rainbow static, cross your eyes to find the mermaid.”

Bucky thinks for a moment and then looks at Steve with an expression that is at least three times calmer than Steve’s feeling and every ounce of that calm probably faked. “What were you planning to do with the symbols?”

Steve shakes his head. “I thought… If we at least can look at them, maybe they’ll start to make sense. Maybe you’ll see a similarity between one of them and, I don’t know, cuneiform. And we could work from there.”

“Why the hell would I know cuneiform? I don’t even know what that _ is_.”

“Yes you do. It’s on that aliens show you insist on arguing with.” Steve lightly sketches a few marks out on the paper. “The little triangles in the clay tablets.”

“Oh. That.”

“Yeah.” He erases the markings. “And you speak Klingon, Bucky. Is cuneiform really a stretch?”

“Okay, point to Steve.” Bucky leans back on his hands and stares up at the trees. “So aside from looking at the symbols and hoping maybe some memory of learning a language I don’t know floats by slow enough I can grab it… What was the plan?”

Steve shrugs. “Read the symbols, see if they say something. Or…” 

He doesn’t want to say it. Doesn’t even want to think it. But if the symbols were like a password that got keyed in and sent them here, maybe they were also the password to get back. Or maybe writing them backwards would do something. 

There are a lot of options, but the more he thinks about them, the less they sound like plausible things one might do with technology and the more they start sounding… Ugh. Like something in Bucky’s weird fantasy comics.

“Or what?” 

“Okay,” Steve says. “So what if we had the symbols, and we drew them backwards?”

Bucky raises an eyebrow. “Backwards so we go back to the future? Really? Sounds kind of like a magic spell to me, Steve.” 

“It’s not magic!” Steve presses a knuckle into his temple. “And anyway, we don’t have the symbols and I don’t think the local wildlife can supply us with a flux capacitor, Bucky.” 

Steve has no idea whether Bucky’s seen that movie. He just knows _ he _hadn’t cared for it much, and hadn’t suggested it when asked for recommendations.

“Bet I’ve got one packed away in the robot arm.”

He fights back a smile, then decides he doesn’t actually need to and just goes ahead and smiles. Bucky hardly ever talks about his metal arm, and when he does, it’s usually negative and vague. Those rare occasions when it’s playful, he always calls it a robot arm. And Bucky feeling playful enough to drop the robot arm into conversation that doesn’t even refer to it… That’s nice. Calming.

“…It’s real streamlined, Buck.” 

Bucky sits up again and shrugs. “That’s HYDRA for you. Sleek, sharp, sophisticated…” 

He gives his metal fingers a waggle, and Steve can see the tightness in his smile and at the corners of his eyes. Not actually playful, then. Just forcing it for morale. Steve appreciates it, all the same, and he’ll play along.

“Let’s hear it for the design team.” 

They sit quietly for a while, each with his own thoughts. He can’t say for sure what Bucky’s thinking, but it doesn’t seem to be actively self-destructive, so Steve lets his own thoughts stray back to the problem of the day. 

They are in some sort of dinosaur forest with practically nothing for supplies and no clear way to get back home. They have both seen the symbols and forgotten what the symbols looked like. Symbols plus twenty-first-century location plus water equals dinosaurs minus symbols. Symbols plus random-prehistoric location plus water could equal home minus dinosaurs. The math is equally squirrely in both directions.

But if they did have the symbols, or could get them, could remember them… Maybe after sleeping on it… 

“Assuming you’re joking about the flux capacitor—” he starts.

“Yeah, I’m joking,” Bucky mutters. “It’s keeping me from screaming.”

Well at least he’s honest about it.

“Right. So the symbols, then.” Steve taps the end of the charcoal pencil against the paper. “Let’s say we remember them eventually or we sketch them out by trial and error until we find something that looks right to both of us.”

“Okay. I’ll bite. What then?”

“What if we were to draw them backward, no joke intended.” Steve chews on his lip for a moment. “Or upside down. Or both. A mirror image to reverse the…” Ugh.

Bucky sighs. “Just say it, Steve.” He rubs at his eyes and then blinks a few times. “Say ‘magic spell.’”

He sounds tired. Not the kind of tired that a nap will fix, or even the kind of tired a solid night’s sleep will touch. He looks the kind of tired this S.H.I.E.L.D.-mandated vacation was supposed to combat, the kind of tired Steve is feeling right now. 

“It’s a magic spell,” Bucky mutters, but his voice doesn’t stay low and tired as he continues, “made out of magic symbols on a _magic_ rock in a magic set of _ magic fucking ruins_, and you _ magicked _ them onto a piece of paper and that paper _ magicked _ us to the _ goddamn Jurassic period!_”

There’s a rustle of ferns and a distinctly louder batch of chittering somewhere off to their right, and Steve would think “raccoons” or “possum,” but it’s probably a nest full of baby dinosaurs instead. And that is a thought he really wishes he had no cause at all to think.

Steve closes his eyes. “Bucky, I’m _ sure _there’s a scientific principle behind this whole—”

“_Say ‘magic._’” Bucky sounds a bit crazed, and when Steve opens his eyes, he looks a bit crazed as well.

“Okay, fine!” Steve snaps at him. “A mirror image to reverse what the _ magic symbols _ did to bring us here—”

“Now.” 

And now Bucky’s just taking some sort of glee in being contrary, and Steve sort of wants to smack him for it, but he knows that’s exactly the wrong track to take. They need to stay at least a little calm, and if Bucky’s out of patience, he’ll just have to step up.

“To bring us _ now_,” Steve says with a sigh. “Because if we mirror the—” he grits his teeth “—the magic symbols, it might reverse the magic spell. Somehow.” What is his life even turning into.

Bucky reaches over to clap him on the shoulder. “There you go, Stevie.” He grins at him, looking just a little manic around the edges. “Just give in. _ Embrace the insanity_.”

Steve shakes his head. “But it doesn’t make sense, Buck. That rock was just sitting there out in the open. Anyone could have touched it. Anyone could have copied the symbols. It’s a _ tourist attraction_. No one else has mysteriously disappeared.”

“That we know of,” Bucky points out. “And how many super soldiers do you figure went sight seeing in those ruins? Gotta be a dozen, right? Maybe two dozen? With connections to the fucking Tesseract?”

And that… actually makes a certain amount of sense, to Steve’s immense displeasure. They both got a version of that serum and they both have messed up metabolism and a number of other side effects from it. Bucky spent a month in close proximity to the Tesseract, being experimented on. Steve saw it in action painfully close up when it… did whatever it did to Schmidt. Then again later in New York. Who even knows what that primed them for?

“You’re thinking it might be yet another ‘fun’ perk of the serum, then.”

Bucky spreads his arms straight, palms out, and makes a wide arch with one hand like a cheese-ball announcer of some grand opening. “Super soldiers,” he declares. “Now susceptible to time travel magic.”

Steve pinches the bridge of his nose, and when that isn’t enough, he lowers his head into his hands with a low groan. “Why…?”

“Because we’re fucked, Steve.” Bucky gives his shoulder another hearty clap and Steve can hear the wide, fakely enthusiastic grin in his voice. “Because you and I are truly, genuinely, entirely, always _ fucked_.”

* * *

Bucky tosses down the charcoal pencil with a frustrated sigh, and Steve honestly doesn’t blame him. They’ve been noodling on these stupid symbols for two hours and they are no closer to anything that looks familiar.

“I’m going to go find us some water,” he mutters. “You keep drawing magic squiggles, Steve, but I’m going to go fucking nuts—_more _ nuts—if I don’t start moving around.”

“No, no, I could use a break, too.” Steve picks up Bucky’s pencil and tucks it and his own into the belt pouch with his kneaded eraser. “And if Godzilla shows up, I’d rather we tackle him together.”

Bucky’s huff of laughter is not amused, but it tries to be. “Honestly, I want to gut Godzilla right down the middle like unzipping a leather onesie, so I hope he _ does _show his scaly face.”

Steve’s only about forty-eight percent sure Bucky’s joking about that, so he doesn’t press the issue. He simply rolls up their paper with the attempted symbols, scoops up Bucky’s Collected Tales, and gives the area a quick glance to be sure he’s not leaving anything—though they don’t have all that much available to be left—before following him out into the ferns.

He’s more than a little concerned that Godzilla will be sneaking along behind them, or that something worse might be lying in wait up ahead, but they encounter almost nothing but insects, little flying squirrel dinosaurs with pointy heads and long necks, and tiny upright lizards with varying degrees of feather coverage.

Almost all of the local wildlife ignores them or flees, which is relatively comforting, until a little brontosaur thing comes ambling along, trailed by six more, all of them maybe knee high at most. They seem to either not notice Steve and Bucky, or not care about them, or not be smart enough to think of evading something that much taller than they are.

Bucky tilts his head and stares. “I thought those were supposed to be… bigger,” he says. “A lot bigger.”

Steve has to agree with him there. “Maybe they’re babies?”

“Well where are the parents, then? What happened to… I don’t know, there must have been a whole herd of these things out on the prehistoric savanna, all fifty feet tall and munching on whatever trees were stupid enough not to grow in a forest like this one.”

Steve shrugs. “They obviously board their children in the forest until they’re big enough not to get stepped on.”

“Oh, and now you’re a dinosaur expert?” Bucky shakes his head and sighs, pinches the bridge of his nose. “I’m sorry, Steve. I’m just really fucking grouchy.”

“It’s okay.” And it is. They’re both more than a little off their game, and if all they’re doing is snapping and sniping at each other, Steve’ll take it. “I think you’re entitled to be grouchy, Buck. This vacation isn’t exactly as advertised.”

Bucky just sighs again and presses onward, occasionally changing direction for reasons Steve can’t guess at and doesn’t bother trying to anticipate. 

Bucky was their forward scout in the War for good reason, and Steve never did learn those ropes because he never had to. And there was a fair amount of scout work he did these days on ops with the Avengers and S.H.I.E.L.D., too. To say nothing of the infiltration and similar he must have gotten up to in between.

If Bucky thinks it’s time to change directions, it’s probably time to change directions. 

They’ve been walking about half an hour more when Bucky stops in front of a tree that looks no different to Steve than any of the others had, and hands over the water bottle, which Steve adds to his other items.

“Stay here. I’m going up. If something comes sniffing, stab it in the face.” Bucky gives the ferns back the way they came a dark look. “I don’t care if it’s a baby long-neck, Steve. You stab it. We might have to eat out here, and they’re going to look really fucking tasty soon.”

And then before Steve can object, he’s up the tree like a monkey, sending the occasional chip of bark or cluster of needles raining downward. A pine cone hits Steve on the head, and he decides that “stay here” includes moving away from the drop zone by a few feet.

He is not stabbing a baby dinosaur in the face. That is not going to happen. He could be starving and he still wouldn’t stab a baby _ anything _in the face. Captain America does not stab children of any species, even if there is no America at the time.

A rainfall of pine needles and cones signals Bucky’s return where his feet hitting the forest floor a moment afterward don’t make a sound. Bucky brushes off his hands and then his arms and legs, but he misses a number of pine needles lodged in his hair. Steve doesn’t point them out because it’s adorable and he needs some adorable right now.

“The view is something else up there, Steve. Also, there’s a sea or a very big lake out to the north, and a stream that probably isn’t dry off to the west.” His metal arm does one of its fidgets, probably because climbing a tree when the lowest branches were still some thirty feet off the ground is a strain. “We’re going west. Then, depending on the light, we’re following that stream north.”

He pauses as though to invite questions or complaints, but Steve just waves for him to start walking. 

They don’t see any more baby long-necks as they walk through the ferns going the same direction Bucky had been heading toward in a little zigzag before getting a look at the area from above. There are plenty of other things they see, including a disturbing amount of insects, lots more of the zippy little lizards, and some sparsely feathered, long-tailed chickens with snake necks and clawed arms.

To Steve’s relief, none of them are worth stabbing in the face, apparently, and they arrive at a burbling stream without a single fatality.

* * *

Something does end up dying before nightfall, of course. 

To Bucky’s delight, there are fish in that stream, and so they end up having what Bucky calls “prehistoric sushi” made out of the five silvery little fish he manages to snag with quick reflexes and the helpful lure of a shiny hand full of waggling fingers.

And if Steve didn’t know they needed to conserve their paper and charcoal for recreating symbols, he’d have sketched Bucky at that stream, belly-down, both arms in the water, as intent and patient as he is on any rooftop while watching things unfold and picking off targets with Barton. 

He’d have drawn the treads on Bucky’s hiking boots, the way the laces still had a few pine needles glued on with sap, the curve of Bucky’s ass and the dip of his lower back, still visible under shirt and jacket, at least to Steve’s eye. He’d have drawn Bucky’s shoulders and the way his hair drifted down over his face as he stared into the water.

And he’d have been interrupted in logging this portion of their vacation by the need to catch flopping spiny fish as Bucky threw them over his back at Steve’s general direction, lest he be hit in the face with them because even blindly throwing fish and probably not intended to catch Steve in the face with said fish, Bucky’s aim was still, well, Bucky’s aim.

It’s not bad as far as fresh-caught sushi goes, though it could do with some sushi rice, a little sake, and a dab of wasabi. Steve’s not really in any position to be picky, though, and he’s not sure rice has even been invented yet.

“I think we should try to draw the symbols again, Buck.” Steve watches as Bucky examines one of the spikes on the fish skin they’d discarded. “Before it’s pitch dark and we have no light.”

Bucky doesn’t answer immediately, but he does lower the flap of fish remains. “You do that,” he finally says. “Your memory is way better than mine, and your artistic eye is way, _ way _better than mine.”

It’s not exactly self-defeating or anything in a similarly worrisome vein. If anything, it’s accurate and nothing more. But something about it still rubs Steve wrong.

“If we work together, though—”

“We will.” Bucky gets to his feet and tosses the bit of fish into the stream with a plop. “You do what you’re good at, Stevie. I’ll do what I’m good at.” He gives Steve’s shoulder a brief squeeze. “I’ll be right back, don’t fucking go anywhere,” he says, before heading off into the ferns.

Steve would far rather they stick together, but something tells him to stay where he is and unroll the paper. 

Maybe it’s just that this is similar to before, when Bucky would get them all settled around a campfire and then disappear into the forest to make sure there weren’t enemy troops sneaking up on their position, or to hide their trail, or whatever it was he did that kept them out of ambushes.

Or maybe it’s just that Bucky still gets a certain way when he’s trying to take care of someone and that someone tries to not let him. And Steve’s been that someone and there’s a tone that says “drink your broth, I had to steal a chicken thigh to make that for you, you punk.”

Or maybe it’s that Bucky’s right, and Steve’s got a better chance at these symbols and Bucky needs some time alone to process all of this. The ferns and the pine trees and the dinosaurs. It _ is _a lot to process, and Steve’s putting it off, himself. He’ll do it later, when it’s over, and they’re home.

Steve’s mostly certain Bucky isn’t hunting down Godzilla to take his frustrations out, so he gets out a charcoal pencil, unrolls his paper, and tries to chase down symbols at the edge of his vision while he waits. 

It’s a long wait, and a nerve-wracking one, and as the light gets progressively dimmer, it’s harder and harder for Steve to remind himself that he will never find Bucky if he just sets off looking, and if he’s not here when Bucky does get back, they’ll be running circles around each other in their mutual searching.

Bucky returns when it’s not exactly dark, but the sun’s so low the light isn’t getting through the trees well anymore. He’s got a massive bundle of what looks like palm fronds tied together with his jacket. He’s also got more pine sap in his hair and a couple of smaller fern fronds stuck to his back.

Steve is a combination of relieved and irate. Palms? The palms they’d seen were all the way the edge of the forest. Beyond the edge, even. That’s not “right back” and Bucky knows it. Yes, they traded off recklessness like it was a hot potato, but that kind of stupid self-endangering—

“You hiked all the way back to the _ plains?!_” 

Bucky scowls at him. “No.” He tosses down his bundle, looking insulted. “I’m not stupid. Saw a little patch of these and they’re what we need, so I took some cuttings.” He reaches into a pocket and tosses a rock at him. “See if you can get some sparks off of that with the knife. We don’t need a fire tonight, but we will at some point.”

Steve stands there holding the rock, and forces his frustration down by sheer willpower. It’s stupid getting mad at Bucky for doing what he knows how to do. Scouting an area, gathering supplies out of thin air, planning ahead—sometimes too far ahead—taking care of other people.

He watches Bucky sort out palms into three different piles, using some internal logic that Steve isn’t seeing, and then begin weaving the individual fronds together into what starts to emerge as a multi-layered triangular mat.

“I’m a little grouchy, myself,” he murmurs, after several minutes. It’s an apology, and he hopes Bucky isn’t too insulted to accept it. He knows Bucky would reject an outright “sorry,” but this other has a chance.

Bucky looks over his shoulder and shoots him a little grin that looks genuine enough in the fading light. “You got as much reason for it as I do.” 

He lifts a single metal finger at some distant, unseen recipient, but his expression remains wryly playful. “Fuck Fury, and S.H.I.E.L.D., and all the brain doctors who made us go on this stupid vacation,” he says. “I could have been watching TV.”

Steve laughs. Well, more a chuckle, but he means it. “If you had it your way, Buck, television would be a contact sport. You yell at the History Channel like it’s going out of style. That’s hardly relaxing.”

“I don’t know. They have some good cooking shows in the future. And terrible home decorating shows. And the morons going on about aliens and pyramids. And Blue Planet.” Bucky strips out a few of the central stalks from the palm branches left over from his little weaving project, and slots them through the rest to make some ribs for the thing. “I like Blue Planet.”

Bucky binge-watched all of Blue Planet the first time he encountered it, and stuffed himself full of documentaries about assorted great migrations, outer space, and all manner of other nature shows after that. He refers to all of them as Blue Planet.

He gets almost scarily invested in the various animals those documentaries follow, and Steve has more than once found him on the edge of the sofa silently but tensely rooting for the elephants to reach a watering hole, or for the whale mother to save her calf from predation, or for the harpy eagle fledglings to successfully take their first flight.

And maybe that inability to calmly observe without tensing up and becoming over-invested is part of the reason they’re taking this vacation. Steve will admit to a certain amount of that tendency himself, though he directs it more toward the people they fail to save when taking out threats, the civilians they can’t clear from the field in time, the ones who are injured or whose livelihoods are lost.

He could almost see how taking a couple of weeks entirely off—no reports on how things are going, no checking in with the team, no watching the news…or Ancient Aliens—was designed to help them unwind a little. And the first little bit of it had, in fact, been relaxing. He’s just not sure how this next bit is supposed to work.

This next bit, of course, was not originally intended to be camping with dinosaurs. Steve doesn’t have the pamphlet here in front of him—_now_, in front of him now—but he’s relatively certain there were no dinosaurs anywhere in the entire tourist arrangement. No famous fossils, no prehistoric tchotchkes, no themed restaurants…

And definitely no camping with dinosaurs.

But he dutifully gets to work striking the blade of Bucky’s knife—and sure, it’s not a machete, but it’s only a little off from it—against the rock, seeing if he can both obtain a spark and avoid ruining the edge of the blade.

While Steve’s at it and getting nowhere, Bucky somehow manhandles his triangular palm-tree kite up into one of the trees nearby, and then hacks down bundle after bundle of fern fronds to haul up after it, coming back with more sap and pine needles each trip. 

Steve has no doubts about the success of whatever it is Bucky is building up there, and when Bucky finally declares himself satisfied and will Steve quick fucking around and get up here, he stows the rock in his belt pouch and makes his own way up the tree.

It’s both higher up than it looked and also only around the middle level of the tree’s crown, and it looks like a demented geometic bird made a nest across two branches that are a bit closer together than the others. 

The combination of woven palm branches, support staves and interlaced fern fronds clearly holds Bucky’s weight, and Steve goes ahead and very carefully joins him on the platform. “Looks nice, Buck.”

“Thanks.”

“Figuring Godzilla can’t find us up here?” Steve cautiously scoots around so he’s side by side with Bucky, their backs to the trunk and their legs stretched out toward the edge of the platform. It’s actually really cushy with all those ferns for padding.

“That and the bugs. Running water, so there won’t be so many as there could be, but I’m betting this is higher up than most of the mosquitoes are going to want to fly.” Bucky snakes an arm around his waist and leans into him. 

Steve hadn’t thought much about mosquitoes. There hadn’t been any so far, and they usually started to show up around dusk, which is at least an hour past by now. “Say, Bucky.” He slings an arm over Buck’s shoulders and leans as well, so they prop each other up. “You ever watch Jurassic Park?”

“No?” Bucky pauses. “I think? What’s it about, aside from the obvious?”

“A bunch of idiots clone dinosaurs from DNA they suck out of prehistoric mosquitoes trapped in amber. They build a park—”

“Because they’re idiots.”

Steve nods. “Yep, and all the dinosaurs get loose and kill people. Chase some kids into a cafeteria. Learn to open doors.” He pauses, since that’s something that Bucky might recognize from pop culture, but there’s no response, so he continues. “There’s one that spits black goo at people and has a frill like one of those little clown lizards you always laugh at.”

Bucky chuckles. “They’re fucking goofy as hell, Steve. How can you _ not _laugh at them?”

Steve shrugs. “Well, this one was a lot bigger. And the black goo is some kind of poison that blinds people.”

“Venom.”

“Sure,” Steve agrees. “Venom. That blinds people.”

Bucky shifts to drape an ankle over Steve’s. “Sounds like a fun movie. Not sure I want to live it.”

“No,” he agrees. “I can do without a t-rex biting a guy in half on the toilet, definitely.”

“Seriously?”

“Apparently, ‘it was the 90s,’” Steve says, making air quotes with his free hand. “Anyway, the mosquito thing just got me thinking is all. About how messed up it would be if something bit us and got covered in sap and later someone tried to make a dinosaur and made one of us instead.”

Bucky is quiet for a few minutes, but since he’s obviously thinking, Steve doesn’t interrupt him. From their perch, he can see out over the shorter trees, and can see the moonlight reflecting off the little stream far below. There are a few little bats—pterodactyls, probably—flitting about, but they’re tiny compared to the school bus, and almost cute.

And the stars, what he can see through the branches and out in the distance, are absolutely exquisite. Clearly defined, bright, so many more of them than he’s ever seen at once. Even more than those artistic shots taken out in the desert where the whole Milky Way is huge and living up to its name. His fingers itch to paint this sky.

“If someone put a clone of me in a park and people paid to see him, made him do tricks for them…” Bucky finally says, soft and reflective and specifically not mentioning assassinations, “and if he was anything like me… he’d totally get loose and kill people.” Bucky nods, assessing his statement and agreeing with it once he’s heard it in the air. “Just because of the indignity of it, you know?”

Steve’s been a dancing monkey, and so what if he wasn’t behind actual barred gates and fences or tortured into it. He knows. “Yeah, I think my clone would, too.”

They’re both lying through their teeth, of course. Steve knows it even if Bucky doesn’t. The people they are now, sure. They’d escape no matter the cost and make their jailers pay for their loss of freedom. They’ve both had enough of that, and they’ve both built up an intolerance for it.

But their clones? Without their life experiences, Steve imagines Bucky’s clone would comply, his clone would dance, and they would both suffer what they accepted as their fate, right up until they met each other. But then, watch out. 

Bucky alone, or Steve alone, could be kept like that, trapped in amber of other people’s making. Together, though, it’s hardly “anyone’s game.” Together, it’s _ their _game, and they’re going to win it.

“I’m glad we’re in this together, Bucky. Whatever this is.” Steve tightens his grip on Bucky’s shoulder, just enough to convey a hug without shifting about too much on their treetop perch. “Or whenever,” he adds with a laugh. “If anyone has a shot at this, it’s us.”

“Back at you, Steve.” Bucky rests his head on Steve’s shoulder and lets out a long, soft breath. “You and me, super soldiers in the land before time, just another pair of fossils.”

Bucky reaches across himself to rest a hand on Steve’s thigh, and twines their fingers together when Steve does the same. “Love you, punk.”

Steve smiles and rests his cheek on Bucky’s head. “Love you, too, Bucky.”


End file.
